Risky Business

Then, in 1998, there was a major outbreak of HIV in the porn industry. Testing for HIV at the time was a lax procedure. There had been very few cases in the heterosexual porn community, and though 'Long' John Holmes, a porn legend, had died of Aids, it was attributed to his drug use or bisexuality. Complacency and corruption were rife and therefore it was not difficult to forge an HIV test result. Mitchell, who was still engaged in her studies, was asked by the Free Speech Coalition to investigate the outbreak. She found that an actor called Mark Wallice had falsified his HIV certificate and infected five actresses through anal sex. In the process, she set up Aim, a non-profit organisation, and instituted a strict regime of testing.

Aim uses the PCR-DNA HIV test, which measures the actual genetic material of HIV in the blood rather than the antibodies. That removes the lagtime for antibodies to build up, but there is still a delay between infection and detection. Typically it takes around two weeks after contraction of HIV for sufficient viral load to amass to register in the test. Since 1998, Aim has conducted more than 80,000 tests on the 1,200 performers who make up the industry. Up until April this year, there were no transmissions. The only positive results detected came from newcomers attempting, unsuccessfully, to get into the industry.

With that record, it might be thought that the industry would be satisfied. But in fact, Mitchell has many critics in the Valley. Some suspect her of making a personal fortune, even though Aim is non-profit. Some resent what they see as the 'monopoly' she holds on testing. To which she responds:'The fire department is also a monopoly. But is that an issue if your house is on fire?'

Others, including the main talent agent in the business, Jim South, complain that Aim extends its remit beyond testing and therefore represents a conflict of interests. When an actor or actress arrives at Aim for the first time, they are told about the pros and cons of the industry and given a videotape, called Porn 101, which warns them in straightforward terms of the situations they should expect to encounter. South has protested that a number of young girls he has sent along to Aim quit the business after the induction meeting.

'Never, ever do I tell people, "Don't do this,"' Mitchell responds.'And there are days when I wish I could, because I see myself walking in here at 17, 18 and I think to myself, "Boy, she could probably be a doctor in about four years, instead of 24."'

Mitchell is now 46 and has a boyfriend from outside the industry. She decided not to have children because she thought she'd be a poor mother, and her maternal instincts went into Aim. But now she is so fed up with the business that she plans to set up her own practice. 'As someone who sits here and sees day-in day-out the deception, the disease, the denial, it looks like a very sordid place. I feel like I'm sweeping back the fucking ocean some days.'

There are, she says, three principal reasons why people become porn performers: money, fame and sex. Those who come from dysfunctional backgrounds and are looking for fame tend to be the most vulnerable to exploitation. The most common career-span is between six months and three years, and it is the people who are focused on earning enough money to set up their own business who leave the industry in the best shape.

I asked, with a certain disbelief, if there were really any people who got into the business for the sex. Mitchell returned my look of incredulity with one of her own. 'Yes,' she said firmly, 'a lot of the men do. They want to have as much sex as possible, with as many people as possible, with as little attachment as possible, and that's why there are a lot of men who are very suited to this industry. That's why those specific males last very long. They often don't have a love interest in their private lives. Performing acts of intimacy over and over again without the actual intimacy really takes a damage on your private life.'

Randy Spears, like Mitchell, used to be a real actor in Hollywood. A rugged-looking character in the Jean-Claude Van Damme mould, he harboured dreams of becoming an action hero. In 1988 there was a writer's strike, film production stopped and he needed money. He'd been a Chippendale dancer and a model, so the step into adult films did not seem so large. 'But as soon as the camera started rolling,' he says of his first porn shoot, 'I knew I was never going to be Bruce Willis. The door was shut.' He speaks of the numbness that takes hold of him after long periods of work. Sometimes he'll work 80 out of 90 days, at the end of which he feels hollowed out. He tried to leave the business in the early Nineties, when he married a porn actress and started a family. They moved to Pennsylvania, where he ran a gym for a while. But the money brought him back and the marriage, like so many in the industry, did not last.

In contrast to Hollywood, the big stars in pornography are nearly all women. Men, with a very few exceptions, are viewed as little more than lumps of muscle attached to a penis. As if to emphasise this point, in Virtual Pleasure Ranch Spears was filmed, for interactive purposes, in such a way that the viewer shared his point of view. He had to arch away from the frame as an overhead camera captured only his genitals. 'Keep your head out of the way!' the director kept shouting, and, 'Chin! Randy, chin!' He was reduced, in other words, to nothing but a penis.

Spears wanted a stable relationship, but most people found it difficult to understand the separation of sex and love. 'I'm a very giving man with a romantic side. I believe in love. But it's difficult when you come home and you don't want to make love. "Sorry honey, I've got two scenes tomorrow."'

He was troubled by the spectre of Aids, and thought about the risks before every scene. It was the 'scary edges of our business' that most bothered him. In the old days he knew everyone he worked with, but now people that he'd never seen before would come and go and he'd never see them again. It was for this reason that he tried to work with actresses he knew. But later on he told me that one of the attractions of the job was that he got to have sex with new young girls. 'I'm still a red-blooded American,' he said. He estimated that there was a 'connection' with a female performer in about three out of 10 scenes. Given the conditions in which the scenes take place - with 15 men looking on, cameras and booms poking from every angle, and the stop-start rhythm of filmmaking - this seemed to be an astonishing rate of success. In the other seven scenes, said Spears, 'You're just being a professional.'

Self-effacing, with a generous sense of humour, Spears continues to think of himself primarily as an actor. He won AVN's best actor award in 1990 for his role in The Masseuse, but it must be a difficult self-image to maintain when, as is the case this afternoon, his dramatic skills are restricted to placing his member repeatedly in Thomas's rear passage. 'First speed!' shouts Whitney, by way of stage direction. Followed by 'Second speed!' and finally, as the scene nears its climax and Thomas complains about how much it hurts, 'Third speed!'

'Cut!' shouts Whitney.'That was great. OK, let's load some tape and do that for real now.' By the half-hearted laughter, you gather that this is an old joke. As Spears pumped away in Thomas's behind, a bald man in a Hawaiian shirt, who looked around 60, stood close by with an expression of avid concentration on his face, as if he were watching the endgame of a chess match. This, it turned out, was Thomas's boyfriend.

She told me that she couldn't talk to me that day because she was tired and still had three more 'pop shots' to do. Also known as the 'money shot', the pop shot is the all-important evidence of male orgasm without which no hard-core porn scene is complete. Randy was to supply another pop, having already donated one, and two male performers were due to arrive to contribute the rest.

According to Randy, this was a friendly set. And it certainly appeared that way, with no shortage of banter and camaraderie. He didn't like the new breed of young directors who abused female performers and showed him scant respect. Sixteen years on, he continued to nurture the regret that he did not remain in Hollywood. He told me that his two children, who lived out of town with their mother, were unaware of what he did for a living. 'I worry about what they'll think,' he said.

Though lively and entertaining on set, Spears seemed to convey an air of quiet melancholy off-camera. When I returned to my hotel, I checked his biography on the internet. That day, I learnt, was his birthday. He was 43.

The following day, out in North Ridge, another part of the Valley, I caught up with Thomas. Whitney had told me that she was the 'most famous prostitute in the world'. It turned out that of late she has been working in a legalised brothel in Nevada as the star attraction.

A former Penthouse Pet of the Month, she is known as the Princess of Porn and the Texas Twister, though she was born in Mississippi and grew up in Florida. She came to LA with her ex-husband, a fellow performer who joined the army after they split up and is now serving in Iraq. The titles of some of her films - Double Penetration Virgins, Gang Bang Fury, Anal Avenue - give a forceful impression of the kind of hard-wearing career she's had.

In past interviews, she's made sure to present herself as 'sex-crazed', telling stories of how she once slept with her ex-husband and his brothers and a nephew. She is a trailer-park fantasy, but one with a 223-acre ranch in Texas where she keeps thoroughbred horses.

Thomas left her husband a couple of years back for a man called Dennis Hof, who owns the Bunnyranch brothel in Carson City, where she was formerly employed. They in turn split up last year and now she is with the bald man, a rival brothel-owner. I asked her how much it cost to hire her in a brothel.'I prefer not to say the amount in interviews,' she explained, 'because it will discourage the men from coming. When they're out there and they see me, it's different.'

Her argument, and it's one that unconsciously echoes that of feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon, is that there is no real difference between pornography and prostitution. Except that in a brothel, she says, men wear condoms.

'If all of us got together in this business and said from now on it was condoms, there's nothing they could do,' she says, sounding for a moment like a shop steward. Nowadays, such is her fear of HIV, she will not work with any men she does not know and trust. This was her last film of her contract with VCA. She has enough money to quit porn, but she continues to make films, she says, 'because I like to get new products out for my fans'.

Her brash veneer made it hard to tell whether she was a cynical businesswoman or a long-term victim. In her own mind, she was in control, but all her relationships were with men who have effectively been pimps, even if she had managed to retain some of the financial spoils.

If Thomas has become something of an industry in her own right, at the other end of the scale are young women like Lina Juliette, a 19-year-old Valley girl of Colombian descent who's been in the business for a year, and Shy Love, a 25-year-old former accountant from Connecticut. Juliette had been approached by a talent scout on the street when she was 17. At the time, she was thinking of joining the Marine Corps or studying interior decoration. Instead of exploring these career options, she waited a year and called the agent.

At first she would only work with other women, then only with men with condoms, but now a veteran of nearly 50 gonzo videos, about the only thing she won't do is double anal. The HIV outbreak had made her more health-conscious, she said, and as a consequence she would no longer do 'interracial' (ie perform with black men), but she insisted that she was not racist. It was just 'a health precaution'. Today she would be performing, or rather receiving, double penetration, taking one man in her vagina and one in her rear, neither of whom would be wearing condoms. Yet she did not seem unduly bothered by the risks.

A slight, pretty girl, her face sparkles but not her eyes, giving the impression that what she shows is detached from what she sees.'I used to think the sex was nasty, but now I understand it more,' she says. 'There are certain dicks I'll work with and certain dicks I won't.' Her ambition is to be like Mercedes, a well-known Latino porn star. She is not in touch with her father, whom she has never known, but the rest of her family are aware of what she does, and they don't mind. Her oldest sister found out when her boyfriend saw Juliette in a porn video he was watching.

Shy Love, who is anything but shy, also claimed her family was happy with her career. Vaguely reminiscent of a young Ali McGraw (everyone in porn seems vaguely reminiscent of someone in Hollywood), she speaks in rapid streams of immodesty. She boasts about getting fired from her accountancy firm for getting a boob job, and says that with a face like hers she never has to look for men. As I speak to her in the changing room, I notice that protruding from between her legs is a dildo. She is using it, she says proudly, to stretch her vagina in preparation for her double penetration scene.

On the set, two furtive young men ready themselves for their parts by masturbating as the crew goes noisily about its work. The scene unfolds with the same mechanical movements of all porn, the blunt choreography of market requirements. The two couples go about their separate business, then swap and do the same thing over again. But there is a problem. The man grappling with Shy Love, a scrawny and timid-looking fellow, is having difficulty gaining and maintaining an erection.

The advent of Viagra was supposed to put an end to the male angst that the writer Susan Faludi memorably called 'waiting for wood'. Yet according to old hands it's a growing problem, because many of the young men attracted to the business simply cannot perform under pressure. The porn star Nina Hartley told Faludi that 'the exploitation of the male [in porn] is very distinct, in that he must cut off his dick from his heart.'

In this case, it's obvious that neither organ is engaged in the job. Love, who appears to take her partner's limp condition as a personal insult, works doggedly to redress the problem. But the more she does, the less he is able to respond. A despairing Whitney calls a halt to proceedings.

When set, for example, against the Sub-Saharan Aids pandemic, the threat of HIV in the US porn industry is of infinitesimal significance. The crisis that confronts the business is not to do with the body but the soul. It's an existential malaise that in truth extends beyond the San Fernando Valley into all corners of the consumer-driven world. In many respects, the plotless cul-de-sac that has been reached in the Valley is a fable of our times. What happens when you finally come up against the limit? What happens when there is no more more?

Before they restart, Juliette has a question. 'About the DP. Both guys are going to be with one girl. What's the other girl doing?'

Whitney thinks about this puzzle and decides that the spare girl should grab the other girl's breasts. 'Remember,' he adds, with ironic reassurance, 'it's all about telling a story.'

About this article

Risky Business

This article appeared in the Observer
on Saturday 31 July 2004.
It was published on
the Guardian website
at 12.15 EDT on Sunday 1 August 2004.
It was first published at 12.15 EDT on Saturday 31 July 2004.